Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance
By John T. Edge, Sandra Beasley, Kevin Young and
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About this ebook
Yes, there is barbecue, but that’s just one course of the meal. With Vinegar and Char the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates twenty years of symposia by offering a collection of poems that are by turns as sophisticated and complex, as vivid and funny, and as buoyant and poignant as any SFA gathering.
The roster of contributors includes Natasha Trethewey, Robert Morgan, Atsuro Riley, Adrienne Su, Richard Blanco, Ed Madden, Nikky Finney, Frank X Walker, Sheryl St. Germain, Molly McCully Brown, and forty-five more. These poets represent past, current, and future conversations about what it means to be southern. Throughout the anthology, region is layered with race, class, sexuality, and other shaping identities.
With an introduction by Sandra Beasley, a thought-provoking foreword by W. Ralph Eubanks, and luminous original artwork by Julie Sola, this collection is an ideal gift. Meant to be savored slowly or devoured at once, these pages are a perfect way to spend the hour before supper, with a glass of iced tea—or the hour after, with a pour of bourbon—and a fitting celebration of the SFA’s focus and community.
John T. Edge
John T. Edge is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. He is author of several books, including Fried Chicken: An American Story, and serves as general editor of the book series Cornbread Nation: The Best of Southern Food Writing (volumes 1, 2, and 3 of which are available from the University of North Carolina Press). Charles Reagan Wilson is director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and coeditor of the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
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Vinegar and Char - John T. Edge
Vinegar & Char
Vinegar & Char
Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance
EDITED BY Sandra Beasley
WELCOME BY John T. Edge
FOREWORD BY W. Ralph Eubanks
ILLUSTRATIONS BY Julie Sola
Published in Association with the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi
This publication is made possible in part through a grant from the Bradley Hale Fund for Southern Studies.
Permissions and credits appear on pages 105–8, which constitute an extension of this copyright page.
© 2018 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
All rights reserved
Designed by Erin Kirk New
Set in Miller Text
Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.
Printed in the United States of America
22 21 20 19 18 P 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data pending
ISBN 9780820354293 (paperback: alk. paper)
ISBN 9780820354309 (ebook)
Contents
John T. Edge, Welcome
W. Ralph Eubanks, Taking My Stand: A Foreword
Sandra Beasley, Lard Poetica: An Introduction
SECTION I
L. Lamar Wilson, Times Like These: Marianna, Florida
Kelly Norman Ellis, Cook
Rose McLarney, Vocabulary Lesson
Elton Glaser, Shucking
George Ella Lyon, Family Style
Greg Brownderville, Carlo Flunks the Seventh Grade
Rebecca Gayle Howell, How to Kill a Hog
Sean Hill, Boy
Sarah Loudin Thomas, The Sacred and the Bread
Michael McFee, Saltine
Nickole Brown, Fanny Says How to Make Potato Salad
Jon Tribble, Livers and Gizzards
Iain Haley Pollock, My Stove’s in Good Condition
Robert Morgan, Singing to Make Butter Come
Garland Strother, Sugar Cane at the A&P
Atsuro Riley, Drill
Molly McCully Brown, When My Mother Is Away
Kevin Young, Prayer for Black-Eyed Peas
SECTION II
Richard Blanco, Mango, Number 61
Sheryl St. Germain, Curry
Caroline Randall Williams, Backbone
Jericho Brown, Like Father
Frank X Walker, Canning Memories
Shirlette Ammons, Food Stamps
Elizabeth Alexander, Talk Radio, D.C.
Iliana Rocha, Ode
Sylvia Woods, Knowing
Wo Chan, such as
Jon Pineda, It Is Simple
Adam Vines, River Politics
Jay Hopler, The Glory Be-B-Q
Nikky Finney, Liberty Street Seafood
Natasha Trethewey, Tableau
Adrienne Su, Savannah Crabs
Naomi Shihab Nye, Going for Peaches, Fredericksburg, Texas
Lynn Powell, Acceptance Speech
Marianne Worthington, Bounty
SECTION III
Ashley M. Jones, Salat Behind Al’s Mediterranean and American Food
Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Jubilee
Elisa Albo, Why It’s Delicious
Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Menudo
Melissa Dickson, Ode to the Avocado
Gaylord Brewer, Duck Confit
Beth Ann Fennelly, Why I Can’t Cook for Your Self-Centered Architect Cousin
Erika Meitner, Pesach in Blacksburg
Jo McDougall, Married
Ed Madden, Easy
Nikki Giovanni, A Theory of Pole Beans
TJ Jarrett, Because Men Do What They Want to Do
Devon Brenner, Sleeping Like Silverware
Diane Gilliam, After Grandma Novi’s Recipe for Blackberry Cake Is Lost at the Press and There’s No Place Left to Look
Brian Spears, Eating a Muffaletta in Des Moines
Vievee Francis, Salt
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Gospel of Barbecue
Jake Adam York, Grace
Contributor Notes
Permissions and Credits
About the Editor
About the Southern Foodways Alliance
Welcome
Since our 1999 founding, the Southern Foodways Alliance has baked poetry into our aesthetic. Prompted by SFA commissions, the region’s finest writers have delivered big truths in small bundles. Mud Creek, Dreamland, Twixt-n-Tween / the cue-joints rise through smoke and glow like roadhouses on Heaven’s way
: With those words, the late Jake Adam York welcomed all to our 2002 barbecue symposium.
In succeeding years, Natasha Trethewey joined us twice. For a Gulf South symposium, she spoke of her Mississippi roots. In 2013, Trethewey returned as U.S. poet laureate to pay homage to York. Poet Kevin Young has spoken more often at SFA symposia than any other collaborator. After Rebecca Gayle Howell read in 2016, Young whispered that a book like Vinegar and Char might be an ideal SFA undertaking.
Sandra Beasley, whom we once engaged to write a suite of poems inspired by a cadre of fictional country-music restaurant entrepreneurs, delivered on Young’s gambit. Here, she showcases poetry that grapples with the thorny issues troubling our region, from racism to poverty. True to the SFA’s sometime irreverence, Beasley also embraces the playful counterbalance of well-turned lines and elegant elisions.
An organization focused on transformative storytelling, SFA believes in poets. Working meter and assonance, enjambment and alliteration, they make good on our promise to challenge conventions and cultivate progress. We regard their works as literary distillates. Brimming with boiled-down truths, the poems collected here offer insightful ways to apprehend this region anew.
— JOHN T. EDGE
Director
Southern Foodways Alliance
Taking My Stand A Foreword
The South has long been a region that wrestles with its place in the world, so it is no surprise that Southerners often find themselves at odds about what it means to be Southern. Most notably, John Crowe Ransom and his doctrinaire band of Agrarian poets at Vanderbilt were determined to define the very idea of what it meant to be Southern when they wrote I’ll Take My Stand in 1930. The Agrarians promoted the idea that those who live below the Mason-Dixon line must be persuaded to look very critically at the advantages of becoming a ‘new South.’
For them the notion of the South evolving beyond its antebellum origins and embracing an urbanism that would lead to a new South
seemed heretical if not downright catastrophic. Instead the Agrarians believed the South must embrace a culture rooted in the land and reject the industrialism of the North. For the Agrarians, the South’s past was a sacrament, and the only Southern past that mattered was that of the white Southern male landowner. There was no room to broaden the circle of what it meant to be Southern nor was there a desire for the sensibilities of the region to move beyond the nineteenth-century idea of itself.
Neither the South’s self-referential perspective nor its competing narratives—from both inside and outside the region—are helpful in defining what the South is or what it means to be Southern. When I read the Agrarians as a student at the University of Mississippi in the